This all sounded reassuringly like what must have been in the science book I’d delivered today. Too reassuring to be the whole of it. I fastened, in a kind of reverse self-defense, on a lurking inconsistency. “Where are the loa supposed to come into this?”

Sherrea shook her head. “Trust me, you don’t want to hear that yet.”

“Then what you just told me isn’t true?”

“I’m trying to explain it in order so it’ll make sense. Look, hoodoo isn’t sticking pins in an apple. Hoodoo is all the energy and attention you bring to what you do. Everything you do. The work of your hands, done with all your attention, becomes a container full of energy that you can transfer to somebody else. Baking bread is a hoodoo work. So’s putting in a garden. Or fixing an amplifier, or teaching someone else to. If you do it right, with your whole head, and an awareness of where it came from, and where it’s going when it leaves you. The process it’s part of. And you have to be concentrating on moving energy, not money.”

“Then this is a hobby business?”

“There’s a difference,” she said with exaggerated patience, “between getting money for what you do, and doing it for money. If you don’t do it for love, or because you think it needs doing, get out and let somebody else do it. If nobody else does it, maybe that means it shouldn’t be done.”

A moth had come to knock against the lantern. There were fireflies in the flowerbeds, and something, an owl maybe, shot out of one of the upper branches and disappeared into the darkness. I thought about the City, about the structure and rules of all its exchanges. I remembered the ones I’d taken part in, right up to the last one. “This sounds really nice. But people don’t live like that. They want what they’ve paid for. They want things evened up. Nothing,” I said, almost against my will, “is free.”

“That’s right — that’s your damn religion, isn’t it? And the rest of the congregation is full of people like Albrecht and Beano.” She was angry. Her expression was hard to read in the unnatural light, but her voice was full of it, and the set of her shoulders, outlined against the sky, was stiff, as if she might lever herself up and go away.

“Don’t,” I said. “Standing by the principle has become a reflex, I guess. Besides, I’ve hurt myself with it. If I give it up now, I’m saying I hurt myself for no good reason.”

“It was a good reason,” she said, very softly. The moth was louder than she was. “You’re both alive and here. You had to pay at his rates, in his currency. There wasn’t time for anything else.”

I dropped my gaze to my crossed ankles and left it there.

“Anyway, as long as you keep the energy, all kinds of energy, moving through the system, everything is free. But as soon as you block some of it off, take it out of circulation — wham. The payback is enormous. You kept your self, your energy, out of every damn thing you did, and you’re still paying for it. Albrecht is stuffing energy in boxes and hiding it in his basement as fast as it comes in, the asshole. And everybody’s paying for it.